


The Return Heptalogy (TRH) Part Six: Master of the Two Worlds

by darkrabbit



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors, Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-25
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-27 14:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 20,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/979865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkrabbit/pseuds/darkrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Candy hearts in Atlantis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Requiem for an Ocean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Candy Hearts in Atlantis.

In the foreground beachy tide pool of a Dream, a blue-eyed man called Jack crouches on a broken mirror. 

After he landed on it.

He doesn’t have any shoes on; his feet, clean and naked, rest unbloodied on the mirror’s remains.

Surf scatters across the sand behind him in the distance, the water remembering the mirror as it once was, like a sapphire dust sky blowing through grains of brassy wheat.

His eyes scatter his senses over the smooth fractures as he turns the shard he’s currently staring at over and over.

The piece of glass shimmers in his agile hands like fragments of frozen sea.

The gold frame is tarnished, but the brightness of older days shows through in spots, here and there, in curling waves of… but soon, the fragment in his hands catches a hovering darkness leaning toward his little golden boat of frame and frame-up.

It has a hawk nose, long and white, below eyeholes. It has a long robe, too, full of black lines and shades of greys. The robe conceals, even if only partially, the drab pale blues of a dotted hospital gown. The feet are obscured; perhaps there aren’t any. Long brown hair cascades down the back, a spicy ribbon of silk.

From a pocketed wrist, a white-gloved hand beckons somberly, shoving a finger westward, toward a setting sun that wasn’t there a minute ago. The other hand clicks open a ticking timepiece that gleams like a silver crystal in the snowy palm.

“Not the best of landings, Jack…” the masked man says in soft tones as he holds two spindly fingers up to Jack’s neck to check for a pulse, “But it’ll do.”

Then the man in the mask reaches up, fitting fingers to the top of his head.

Rip, pop, peel.

Shuuuurkt!

“It’s not a surprise, really- I’ve been off for a while now…” the new face murmurs, scrubbing itself with long squarish fingers, “…and it happened long before my… before little Amelia… heh. Before Amy Pond -that’s her, the seven year old, I mean… my mother-in-law- told me I wasn’t… what I’d convinced myself I was.”

There is, Jack notices, a rude chin, an anxious rabbit nose. Two pale jade eyes that peer from deep cup sockets- although it feels like four… one set an old wooden goblet filled with coldly flowing mercury, the other set a rusted, stranger, daytripping furnace, taking in ashes and spitting out white saplings. Above all this now, instead of ribbony hair the color of milk chocolate silk, there hangs an unruly mess of furry brown that flips down at a queer angle on one side, like the ear of a Cashmere Lop.

“You see,” the man adds, reaching over and applying his fingers to Jack’s head, “…Davros was right. I’m not Gandalf. I’m Bunny Foo Foo.” His eyes redden with water; he rubs them, blinking. “What is it they say at the old ball game? Three strikes, you’re out?”

Then the man smiles sadly, before smacking Jack’s own smooth, soft, rough brown haired head.

Jack disappears.


	2. River of No Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dangerous Malison.

A crunching rumbles through the rocks behind the Doctor. 

But he is watching the spot where Jack used to be, wondering and wandering and wondering at how the man managed to… not see it for so long. Or maybe it was… well of course it was -him-, not -him-. Obviously.

Crunch. Crack.

Crumble, crumble.

Crunch.

Crack.

He looks up, but not behind, to find a woman’s shadow picking its way along the curves and corners of his stony perch, pleased with itself.

“…-her-self, my love,” River says softly, draping her arms around him.

My god, she’s wearing a sundress. 

And faded jeans. 

One of his old ties, slightly burnt.

A photograph, he thinks, in red stiletto heels.

“Which one are you, anyway and how can you walk in those?”

River lets her chin down onto his brown hair, resting her lower jaw as though about to set an animal free into those wilds of deepest darkest field mouse. Her fingers snake over his arm, guiding his muscles until he is forced to turn his head to look where they are pointing together.

Two towers in the distance. Singing. The end of her, then.

An involuntary shudder takes him; her warm hands catch the feathering sunlight all the way down as it plays along his backside in an undecided halo.

He feels warmer.

“It’s your dream, beloved…” she murmurs at his ear, into his brains, melting like white chocolate with bits in as the dense bright heat is shoving between them, the words effecting the gleam off a cold sausage tin, “… you tell me. But this is where I get off. See you soon, and thank you for the screwdriver.”

A kiss becomes a nibble at his ear, teeth chattering to a different drummer’s resonance. 

He gives her a hand down the lumps of rock, sighing only when her flesh has long abandoned his fingers, and the scent of her perfume is a bookend against the dawn spilling over the empty space where the towers were standing.

And so she leaves him, like a photograph.  
He sighs again.

Perhaps later, he’ll try for a smile.


	3. Yellow Girl Submarine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Temple of App Shy.

It was a long night of programming with the missus.

The Master shifts in his sleep.

Glongggggg. 

Glongggggg.

Glongggggg.

Glongggggg.

…  
…  
…

A deep clanging noise, his own personal cloister bell, erupts near his ear and begins, in the long upheld tradition of overlarge gongs, to toll loudly through him. 

“Is there an elephant in the room?” his drowsy tongue slurs.

He reaches his elbow over Flamina to grab his jeans… but his brain cells misgauge the distance, sending his forearm stumbling over empty air.

His arm falls down, striking hard floor; his eyes jolt awake at the sound of an extra ding rapping against the white ground, like oblivion.

Oh god. He realises it as he looks down at the golden ring wrapping his finger like a soothsayer’s curse. 

Oh god, oh god. Flamina was never… Flamina was never…

Because Rosette is there, staring up at him out of the ground as though through a window, a golden wreath of girl framed by a pink floor.

His fingers scrape against her rosy carapace; they scratch at her blue, green, grey and golden eyes heavy-lined with gold-feathered mascara-like blotches. The semblance of rouge on her face is fuschia laced with gold dust; he screeches wordlessly at it, tracing the crumbled gold leaf piles of dust at her Fortuna feet like love-hate words in the sand of a distant strand.

“…you,” he breathes blankly, staring, his hot-stung gaze like bloody mirrors, suddenly bloodshot.

“…I know,” she says, straining a sugary soup of softness into her words with just those silent, saucer orbs she might call eyes, “…Rose Tyler, Defender of the Universe- blonde chit, yellow girl, chav extraordinaire, to the rescue. The Doctor needs to hear what I’m gonna say before I say it…” Her light-filled eyes roll up in a groan, crisping the edges of the golden dayshine blonde-dyed hair spilling into the pink hoodie. She grips his face with glitter-sprinkled hands, gold pouring into his vision like liquid butter in a vintage popcorn machine, “And you’re gonna tell ‘im.”

The Master scrubs his hair through with his hand. Perhaps if he regenerates into a bald man he won’t have to do this again.

“… what is it I’m supposed to tell him? Besides the fact I want to wring his scrawny chicken neck like a tasty turkey and stuff him with rice, then hand him over to the local street urchins as a piñata for making up this exquisite little fib about my online girlfriend?”

Rosette the TARDIS and Rose Tyler the woman who loves and might possibly be loved by… that prat. That Prat with a capital P. No difference.

Really? This will take some getting used to, he thinks, as he narrows his eyes at her, grinding his teeth together.

Rose Tyler smiles, her lips part in that pout he’s always heard about, and then she laughs, the sound chiming deeply through the rooms of her hull, and the world below them lights up for a split hair’s second. 

“You’ve got three minutes. ‘t’s all I can give you. Tell ‘im… Tell ‘im Bouncy Castle says to try the other radio. There’s his signal now. Shift it.”

“What?”

But then a buzz comes over the comms. 

Zzzz-crackle-zzz.

“Hello up there? Do you have any tea left? I’m out of black oolong… and the stupid chronon bombs, they just don’t understand the need for a proper service… When I get out of here, I’m going to have to do something about…”

The Master sighs and snaps his fingers, causing the fuzzy black pussy willow arm of an old style radio show boom to elongate from the ether and up through his grasp. He clicks the on button, then speaks into the microphone, coughing for effect.

“Idiot. Shut up. As if you’d ever get out of there without me. The blonde chit who turned herself into a TARDIS says hello, something about a Bouncy Castle and trying the other radio.”

A short pause from the comm, and then, a soft hitch before the mast, “… did she mean the Siesta, the Admiral or the Amberola?”

 

“YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW? Oh my fucking god, I’m writing my will, right now. I am! I’m writing it. I’m fucking writing my god damn will, you are the biggest moron in the history of…”

“Hrm… definitely the Siesta… or maybe the Amberola…”

“Gaaah! For once in your life can’t you just bloody pick one? The cake may be a lie, but you are the Troll King under the god damn bridge! PICK ONE! We only have one minute left!”

“Oh. Why didn’t you say so?”

“…heavens to betsy we’re all going to die if you decide to change your cravat tomorrow!”

‘Wait, wait wait, I’m running to the engine room now! I just have to check something! …what’s wrong with my cravat?”

“Must… kill… stupid… person… and stop drumming your fingers on the console to make the running sounds!”


	4. Lagrange Pointillists

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magikarpal Tunnel.

“… definitely the Admiral,” the 8th Doctor Flesh says softly to the TARDIS from his nice comfy high back chair, “…it was the only real choice, wasn’t it dear? It was, it was. It’s obvious really, because I was the very model of a modern Major General once, wasn’t I, and once I pull this wire and clip this doohickey here… attach this thingamajig to that bit there… oh wait that was the electric teapot. Oops. Was that the Admiral I just tripped over and broke? Oh it was, wasn’t it? Damn dyspraxia- this Flesh is failing, then. I’d better be quick. Ah, hm. Well, then. Hello, Amberola! And Dear, thank you so much for inviting me! And bringing the party favours to the console room. Always that.” 

He stands for a moment with the flat of his hand against the TARDIS’ center console, then lifts the top of the standing old honey-colored Amberola; it slides off into his hand.

Just then a view screen drops down a bit too quickly on a periscope, smashing onto last week’s luncheon napkin (on which he is certain he scribbled the meaning of the universe for a fan at the party) and a treatise on the proper accord for dancing in one’s teacup with the tiny unicorn people of Flibbertigibbet.

The Master’s face and hands seem to be at odds through the viewfinder, as though the man is uncertain whether to tie his converse laces or wrap them around an absent neck… his fingers are twitching that-a-way, see? Obviously, he craves a freshly- greased garrote for his birthday. What a queer request for a party favour.

The Master seems to be mumbling something about… oh what is it?

The Eighth Doctor Flesh cranes his neck, arching his ear to the shuffling muffle of sound. 

“… all blonde girls named Rose… this annoying... back when he was… annoyed me too… want to strangle…” 

“…Oh, garrotes are so last week. How about a nice pickled onion instead?”

“You -are- a pickled onion, oh ye worm of man’s imagining. WE HAVE FIFTEEN SECONDS BEFORE THIS PARTICULAR WINDOW IS CLOSED! But oh jellies what’s the use. You give me hives, you wonderful dolt. See you in an hour or so, when the next shift in the field rolls along!”

The Eighth Doctor twirls around merrily, the lid of the antique radio balancing in the light fingers of one hand as though it’s a tray of hors d’ oeuvres. 

“I suppose I should drop it now, hrm?” he asks the TARDIS, his red velvet shoulders drooping a little along with the rest of the waistcoat. 

The vitrola Amberola’s heavy lid falls squarely on his foot, but at least he’s found what he’s been looking for. 

His death note, written on a blue post-it and stuck on the inside of the vitrola.

He doesn’t blink.

“Ah, pain clears the mind; it’s time to work. I need a dual-plane temporal wrench, my silver-plated Double Fanucci set, a lock of Rose’s hair and a cauldron, oh and…” he clicks the list off the fingers of his free hand, “…in about an hour Koschei, I mean the Master, I mean Koschei, my but I’m whirly today, will be on the television again, nattering at me to fix that stupid problem of his. But I’m melting, look at that!” he holds up a glove, all lumpy and drainy and full of white liquid, like a blown up balloon filled with glue. “Temporal grace me, would you? I need to speed things up without going out like the wicked witch before I’m quite ready.”

An hour passes.

Koschei’s face appears in the screen again.

“I feel like a vitrola after it married a rainstorm and had an argument with a solar flare,” the Eighth Doctor Flesh slurs slowly, from a mouth now little more than a steaming pile of white on the floor. “And since I’m unavailable at any number, one of us will have to get Rassilon. He’s the only other one of us who has had contact with…That One… well, besides me. I don’t feel good. Do I look like curdled milk? Have I married a pudding? I feel like I did. A blood pudding? A Yorkshire? Black? Bread? White? Brown? Plum cake and cheese perhaps, or a nice fruit plate? No?”

The Master waits for a moment, looking on the talking pile of white goo. Then he says, “Yes, yes I get it. No need to speak the words. And speaking of sorry, the honeymoon was always over for me, you big lump. Where is Rassilon now? Do -you- know where he was going?”

The goo says nothing now; it just bubbles, a pale riveting pool of hot spring mud. 

The Master’s mind springs to a thought of his escape route, installed behind the console of the hidden comm room.

Rassilon can fly a shuttle, he reasons, clutching and releasing his hoodie like a worry doll. It stands to reason he found the button for the first part of the flight plan in the… and if he did, he must be on the return trip by now… as planned. The Doctor must have planned it; the bastard plans everything else. Kind of. Possibly. Maybe-probably. Idiot. Hopefully.

The Master then turns to Rose/Rosette and says, “You know what I want. Send it.” Then his fingers stab out weakly and he says, “Engage.”

But his eyes say, “…don’t tell him I’m a trekkie or I’ll turn you into kuchen dough, Little Miss Yellow Annoying.”

Once more a milky effigy, Rose/Rosette giggles as she sends the message through the point between Gallifrey’s two suns, the signal piggybacking on the TARDIS and riding on the tiny violin’s undetectable temporal contrail, hidden just enough, timed just so with three seconds to spare. It will make it through the mine cloud’s blind spot without detonating everytime, everywhere.

It must. The shuttle must be reached.

And Rassilon must hear.


	5. To the Lighthouse, Bagman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dust Leading.

“So that’s what happened… hrm,” Rassilon says softly, to the hologram of the bitey mad lady in faded not entirely appropriate blue.

“And this shape, this… shuttle shape? Did you choose it? Or did he?”

A tremor echoes over and through and under and between the bowels of her before she can answer, rocking her ensorcelled molecules as a giant crib, rocked by an unseen, shifting hand. 

The shuttle, who is the TARDIS, who is the shuttle, breaks apart at the rhythm of the sudden words, like flour dust. She comes together again, a shadow. Herself. Alone. Without her Thief, but together with the man called Dallyrasse who became Rassilon, of the Triumvirate. 

The message that Rose has spoken, will speak, is speaking now.

The TARDIS relays the message to the man called Dallyrasse, stroking the ears of his always-working brain with soft sounds that approximate speech, clicks and whirs and buzzing bits of light and noise.

Just a few letters, really; not even a whole missive. Just four little words with which the man ought to be familiar.

A shadow at Pharos. 

That is the message she has received. And now they both have heard it.

“Are we the only ones who still believe that Gallifrey was the light of the universe?” he asks her, not expecting a response. 

At his choice of was, she chooses to pitch a bit, causing the man Dallyrasse to nod his head at her and smile as he clings to post and crash couch and edge of slim window, pausing to catch his breath against the fickle wind that is this special ship. He is appreciative.

“My apologies, madam. I meant to say is. Even so, Gallifrey is but one lamp in a sea of tossing lanterns, next to his steady light. The Doctor might be the true-star of us all, if he is not careful. Indeed as both of us well know, if his steps do not carry him out of the sun, he will burn before he can walk. And what can I do? I cannot save him from himself. What too, is left to me now? What can I yet do for this land I find myself still wandering? Do you have an answer for me, Ship? I have said I have no more wax for him, nor he for me. Bah. I am an old fool, and this is a day evocative of old poetry. Are we still on course, My Lady Blue?” 

A clear-buttoned sensor bleeps a soft square of blue at him, cancelling that idle doubt.

“To Gallifrey, then…” he says aloud, raising a metaphorical glass to the Ship, which the interface with a small cinnamon bun tower of topsy brown hair in slightly stringy curls returns in earnest agreement by pretending to bite him. 

The shuttle rocks again.

But this time, the Interface is looking in the same direction as her passenger.

They look at each other now, wondering at the thing they have just felt.

“My thief,” she murmurs matter of factly, “… is my thief. We stole each other. And he’s always bringing home strays for me to look after, although I usually like most of them. He has an exquisite eye.”

“I am sure he does. My dear, do you agree with me that in that last shiver of your timbers we seem to have had an ultimatum from the universe to shift ourselves?” the Time Lord says. At her nod of yes, he grabs the controls once again and turns her, veering off the plotted course- steering for Gallifrey.

“Now, let me guess,” he adds, patting the shuttle’s console as the holographic image of the TARDIS avatar pours them both a holographic cup of tea and settles into the very real command chair across from his, “… whatever is affecting Gallifrey and therefore your temporal-shift functions must be chronon-related, otherwise he would never ask for my help, because he needs my knowledge of the laws of Anti-Time reactions. Correct me if I’m wrong… but I believe I can shift your temporal signature into the Anti-Time dimension long enough to hide you from problem eyes. Care to join me in another cup?”

He holds up a real cup of tea, and in a shimmer of gold, her real hand takes it from his grasp.

It feels warm.

A third throbbing wave of colorless, odorless, all natural chronotic displacement hits the shuttle then, but this time, a hatch above his head opens up, plopping a golden clamshell clutch purse into his teapot.

There is a plastic baggie sticking out of it…


	6. Roman Midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Locketeer.

The Flesh pool of 8th Doctor on the floor of the TARDIS console room rises up in the form of heavy, cream-like steam and clings to the underside of the main center column of panels, preparing to retake society from the floor, where it sank and waited after the TARDIS rode the violin to freedom.

“Well that was an engaging side trip…” it murmurs, manifesting a bubbly mouth, “…and this must be the way Shub Niggurath felt after the hjunottsmanathr. How lovely for good old Shubby!”

“Ahem…”a clearing of silvery throat arises from the now-open passage, bearing to mind the name of only one man unto its only less than star-struck other resident.

“Hello, Rassilon,” sighs the Flesh as it attempts to form hands again, to haul itself up from the goo it became.

Rassilon, who once was mere enterprising Dallyrasse, comes round the console with only the vaguest of subtle flourishes and kneels beside the industrious white pool of gluey wonder, leaning back on heels squatted and booted to engage in a bit of the idle theatre.

Slowly, slowly, it becomes a him again, and he attains the console top with two melty hands and a look of attenuate grace as two naked feet form under him. 

The man’s big hand frightens him for an instant, until he realises the gift isn’t German. Or ingestible. Or Greek. So he takes the fingers up in their offer, rising the rest of the way on partial legs. He’ll not be complete again, but at least he will last for the duration until time runs out.

“I was most interested in what your little missive might have said, before the mast. Do you care to enlighten me?” Rassilon quirks, eyeing the newly-recovered Flesh of the 8th Doctor with the spry care of a tafelshrew, willing and patient. Or perhaps a squirrel. 

The Flesh then struggles for a moment, concentrating with fists down and eyes closed toward the sky. A pair of teddy bear pyjama bottoms are managed, then a moving picture pirate’s white blouson. He will not tell.

“Hayseed…” Rassilon smirks without a smile to lay it on, tipping his grey-nibbled jet black hair in fiery tribute.

“Inanimate object…” the 8th Doctor Flesh mouths softly, sensual red lips flattening in thorny treason against the icy innocence affixed on his still-translucent face. 

“Your hair looks wet, dear Doctor,” adds Rassilon, reaching over to grab a fistful of slightly damp, burned carrot curls and piercing them with those cold, cold eyes of blue ice, “…why did you take this form, out of all of them? I admit to being a bit… intrigued.”

The Flesh turns away, not caring that bits of his hair come out, having not really been all that attached in the first place.

“Do you think you could leave us alone for a bit, my Lord General? I’d like to mourn it, my hair. It was good to me…” the Flesh pleads, the very image of the poignant dramatistic milquetoast with his fair hand dangling languid against his pale forehead.

Rassilon replies, “And that’s just like you, to whinge philosophic about your curls in an unfleeting moment. Still, the question must be asked.”

The Flesh looks up; his body heaves above itself, then sags, a heap of unnecessary breathing bothering to breathe. It says, “…you’re right. But if I’d stayed to be Lord President for any longer, it would have killed me, and that would have surely killed whomever I was forced to govern over, as well. And you killed people, too. We mustn’t forget just who you killed, either. That one will be a hard time washing off the walls of my memory palace, despite our working together at present.”

As the rational do, Rassilon considers this with a soldier’s vital detachment. Is the Doctor, no, the Other… his old friend… really that -he searches for the word for his own inner reasons- distracted? No… the word he wants is… unhinged. 

“Your memory palace…” he adds as he walks around to face the man with earnest eyes set above a mouth suddenly hungry for the taste of ash, “… is noplace I should ever love to look for death without a guide. Can I help you scrub it clean?”

Suddenly the Flesh’s turning face is near his, blue-gray chariots of nitrous frieze plopping sideways at him in a rictus so dark even he feels shaken by what he might find should he truly look on those depths and pay them their due attention.

“I wouldn’t go in there alone either, really…” the Flesh chimes in a flat and dangerous tone, “…good call. We must away now, Dallyrasse- I have a stop to make before we spice the punch.”

After answering, the Flesh whirls on him, seeping against his clothing in a wet and living wind, leaving only a face as it moves over and through and between the folds of his robes before fully forming again in all his ginger scarecrow glory. Now on the other side of the console, the Flesh stalks away through the shuttle’s bay hangar door like Sergeant Pepper on a bender. 

Only when he himself returns to the cockpit does he realise it, as his lips chill to white and his hearts beat like dying furnaces against the loss.

Something is missing from his person.

And it isn’t the clutch purse.


	7. Wake-Up Call of Cthulhu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liber Vaccae.

“Susan! SUSAN!” 

The scream rips through the Valeyard for the last time as the two monks Roda has stationed on either side of his modest bed in the darkened old room come to scratch his shoulders in expert foreclaws of unrelieved grey. 

They hold him down until he shuffles under the sheets, claws rounding his struggling muscles with red rings as consciousness finally settles on him, lining his face.

“What is this thing inside me? It isn’t the girl; that fool is still hiding her somewhere! SO WHAT IS IT?” he cries, squarish fingers digging and pushing and shoving and poking his flat stomach until little waves crescendo over the taut skin. 

Two clawlike hands hold up a kind of x-ray-thingie showing a tiny fold of wriggling… bean-shaped…

“...this Flesh, it’s still pregnant? What? Wha-how? Why? I don’t have time for this! I’m the Valeyard, not a babysitter! You’ll cut it out, because I can’t manipulate this Flesh any longer; he’s locked it, the idiotic troll… I wonder if it will taste good in soup…” 

He snarls his lip upward like a rabid dog at the thought of the Doctor’s little tricks, then stares straight ahead while the monks catch his neck with their claws; they’re taking his blood pressures.

“It isn’t like I don’t have things to do, you know! Hurry it up!” He yells, flipping a tray into the face of one monk with his hand. With the other hand, he massages his stomach again, testing his new nerves for any familiar signs of the exquisite physiological memory his real body had enjoyed through the artificial nuclei of the Rassilon Imprimatur. 

The monks spring back as he shoves himself up and off the litter, but he wobbles against the wall just as his feet touch the floor, recoiling from the cold he finds there.

He leans dizzily, hopping from one foot to the other as the bird-headed pair of ascetics keep their beady little eyes on him, turning his entire lithe frame inside out with their odd little faces in their odd little skulls. The Doctor had enjoyed their company of course, but the Valeyard finds them rather crass and annoying.

“Uhn. Just catching my breath. Don’t you have somewhere to be, something to chant, you understuffed turkeys?” His breath chills, catching the air in a huff of white frost that sprays a foot out from him, then dissipates like fine dust. “Brrr! It’s cold in here! Isn’t it? Can’t you feel that?”

His widening green eyes flare open, flicking from face to face in the dark of the room.

The monks, easy in their black and tan hoods and cowled robes, merely gaze at one another, as though evaluating him for a mental assessment. Stupid birds. Stupid, stupid birds. They’ll be first on the menu, once he’s out of here. He ought to invite the Master for a pic-a-nic…

“We,” they murmur softly at the same time, “… feel nothing, Valeyard. Perhaps it is your blood volume spikes? They went up quite a bit the last time you collapsed, right after you resorbed the Flesh that were with you in the room. And today is the warmest day of Sprinjjiia, the Ansypporan warm season.” Their wing-sleeves wave for emphasis, long claws casting a forked shadow over the wall behind him. “Perhaps you should take a bit more rest while we prepare a quick stew for you. Some food may warm your spirit. Slightly. Have you noticed any odd cravings?”

Enraged, the Valeyard clutches his low bed, bracing himself against the back wall. 

Cravings? Stew? The last time? Resorbed? Interesting…

“I see. Well, I could eat a horse… preferably Arthur, maybe…” he murmurs, confused and holding his head now as he sinks back down to sit on the bed under their softly lowering claws. “But I’ve never been here… I know -he- has, but… this really doesn’t matter. I have a contact that needs my attention on Gallifrey. If I don’t get a signal to him, you lot are going to be sorry. And preferably stuffed with wild rice- got to get some meat on those bones! Well, on these bones, anyway. Haha.”

“Oh you have, Valeyard,” Roda Palfour says gently from behind the opening door, museum-side, “…but the Student did not want you to remember until he needed you to. So he set traps for you. You see? The object within the Cloud was only a part of it. We do not know the whole ourselves. He will tell you when he wishes you to be told. Right now, though,” one long digit sharpens toward the Valeyard’s belly, “…for the time being, we alone will… we must… deal with the shard you carry. It must not escape the corridors of the Pyramid as it escaped the Void, do you understand? It must not leave here; it does not belong. Whatever you may believe, he is not hiding her from –you-. And you were not hiding her from –him-. He allowed you to place him in that room.” The old bird monk then sweeps his hand toward the doors on both sides of the little room; the monks instantly assume positions and close them, twisting their claws so slightly that without Time Lord hearing one might never have guessed they were locking anything. 

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Moving on! What the hell? What’s going on here? Are you saying this baby…thing is from Jersey, from when the Cracks appeared? So what? Any enemy of the Doctor is my best mate…” the Valeyard chokes, rubbing his stomach gingerly, as if enjoying the thought that the embryo might suddenly grow and eat his innards for lunch. “Ah, it’s settled then! I like anything he doesn’t like. What’s not to love about a kid who doesn’t like that pervy uncle who’ll only go for teenage blonde shop girl types hanging on their every word and telling them what to do, eh? Eh? And Jersey’s not that bad, really… if you don’t mind the alien plastic flamingo pigmies during the summer months…” 

He grins then, looking from Roda’s wrinkled raptor prune of a face to the younger monks’ smoother gazes. “What? Why the long faces? Did somebody die? Don’t tell me you met an alien plastic flamingo pigmy! They’re worse than those fanged white bunnies… and don’t even start about the man-eating carnivorous quatrefoil vulgaris! Did you run, like the little twit tells everyone to do? How lovely.” He grimaces then, and pulls his feet up under the covers, grabbing at his toes to warm them… “It’s so cold in here. Can’t you put some heating in? Gods and graces, so hard to find good help. I ought to slaughter the lot of you, stuff you with apples and serve you to Koschei, but he’s too busy playing house with that annoying Pythian child. So I’ll just… yes, I’ll just… do you have anything to eat?” he adds, staring ahead as he grabs his arms and rubs, “…I’m so cold. And I’m starving.”

The beady monk eyes stare at one another, then at Roda. Then they all three exit the room, Roda’s voice calling out from the hallway that they will fetch him more blankets, and that the brother on kitchen duty will soon have something for him to consume which will warm him, should he require it.

“Require it…bah!” the Valeyard breathes to himself, glaring at the now locked and heavy doors leading out of his small, minimalist’s vacation home of a room. As he draws the thin sheets around his body and pinches his sleeping ankles, he adds, with teeth chattering, “…but could you worthless malnourished chickens hurry up with the blankets please? I can’t feel my legs… why aren’t they… this isn’t good- suddenly I want to sleep again… but Flesh don’t have to… sleep… I don’t want… to… I won’t…”

His head falls back.

His eyes narrow in wide, wet rictus at his body, puppeting itself. Puppeting –him-, like the wild, cracking gape of a demon drum.

His face becomes the mask of a staring octopus as unconsciousness, disregarding of his wishes, grips his toes like a tiger’s tail and drags him floorward, backward, into the dark.

Into the cold.


	8. The Way We Weren't

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose Addled.

Drip…  
Drip…  
Drip…   
Drippety-drop…

White showers down in little bits onto the floor of the Zero Room. 

Plop.

Plop.

Plop.

Woosh!

The drops form shoes, baking themselves into dual back-curves of keratin and phalange and sinew that wind up like stairs into a bolus of bulging foreleg.

The forelegs bend slightly, surging up and toward themselves like transfixed eyes following the shine off a newly-rinsed palette knife, bending and curving and rounding until they reach a certain height, a height suitable for sliding kneecaps and the gristly tinsel of glutes.

The curve of all-white laces itself in the old time fashion of good stout boots, up the walk and down and up again of pelvis and spine, jutting little pieces out here and there.

Soon, a brilliant red bowtie hangs for a second across a bare and blankish scapula; there is no skin to hold it though, so it soon melts away again, leaving alabaster lungs and other brother and sister organs pumping anti-climactically in its place. No reason, their master thinks softly, to name them here.

He already flunked Academy once.

And once is enough really.

Really and truly.

Well…

He reaches out with new hands, white hands, to touch the empty air.

His back feels chalky still; there is a certain grit to him, and for once it’s not some consequence of the life he’s led. 

No.

There are tiny bumps of dryness curdling across his upper body, scampering across him like a melanoma on shore leave. 

His life, he thinks, shrugging mentally.

How abysmal.

Soon he will be dry, hard clay instead of drippy slip.

At last, some action.

“I thought he’d never leave, Doctor…” Rosette’s interface calls softly to him, rising from the floor behind in a whirl of girl and eau de something pleasant. 

The whole ship smells of roses, that sweet, soft, delicate spray of reddish or greenish or white or cream or rainbow. Or blue. Or black. Of hips and petals and all things named as they should be.

Rose. Oh Rose.

“Do you have it?” he asks with white lips, his flesh taking on its natural color as she leans toward his back, a tower of white in Rose’s form.

The Bismuth Sunrise Rose. 

And Rose’s slow acknowledging nod- not quite a cameo, not quite a pop culture poster on a teenager’s bedroom wall.

And eee by by gum! The hands… oh the hands… that scent! 

All over the ship!

All over the ship! 

…

Mmm… all over the ship…

“Hi, Doc… I hear that lots of places have a north…” the interface murmurs, falling against his back and staying there, one hand wrapping and snaking irreverently like a porcelain coat, “…that still true?” 

The fingers of her free hand cling to his skin, gripping his jaw. His rusty mouth springs open like an old iron trap as she tucks the brilliant rainbow-colored rose behind his ear like Biv’s boutonniere, idling over everywhere of him. Especially his hair.

A giggle escapes her.

“Look at you- you’re Carmen from Toreador,” she laughs, eyeing the multicolored blossom in his hair; the bloom, caressed by the ample light in the room, cascades itself into every corner in a spectrum of stained glass. “… a barefoot Count on consecrated ground…” She dances her eyes away from him for a moment, taking in every fractured split of light on the walls. “… and you’ve turned me into a cathedral.” Her lips whisper to his, crossing him like a nun’s silent refrain. “I like this better than being a bouncy castle. Just thought you should know. Doctor.”

“Helloooo, Fortuna!” he gasps, with an entirely reverent lack of oxygen, his re-formed lungs staggering against his usually formidable ribcage like two beached whales before he sighs, and endeavours toward a modicum of speech.

It comes out in a whisper, too.

“…I take it you missed me… my Goddess of Gold…”

…

But in Rosette’s console room, another conversation is brewing.

The Master stands in the center of the emptiness; his long arm, here again, is molded against his side like a plastic boat left uninflated against the torrent of the falls, his fingers clipped on the lavender hem of a bluish corset, dangling a rusty old tag.

The unnecessary bank of controls, with its blinking squarish lights and panels and screens seems so very far away.

But he’s the Master.

He’s not going to bitch and sob ten feet away from the console like that idiot would.

He stuffs his empty hand in his pocket, drags out a crumpled white bag, and begins tossing back the Doctor’s favorite little sweet iconic candies like a barfly at the peanuts.

And every time he gets one in his mouth, he takes a step.

With every step, his smile gets a little wider.

Jelly baby steps it is, then.


	9. The Rose and the Roux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I, who have always been here.

The TARDIS library is as good a place as any, the Eight Flesh supposes, as he applies wobble-fingers to the cravat around his throat. 

It flutters to the floor, followed by the velvet sleeves of his greenish bluish coat.

His trousers… his stockings, too, are cast aside, into the safe from the smelt-pan pile.

He looks down at himself.

Lithe, fit. Slightly bony. Long Byronesque fingers. Well, they had been long, once… now they are a bit like stumps with nerves in.

His eyes move further down, finding melty Dali elbows; his legs are a Carrington landscape of colors one should never want to find on one’s body, should one be humanoid. The right complexion, he has found, is everything.

Calves line up where they ought, albeit full of holes.

His bum will melt a good dent into his big comfy chair soon, if he doesn’t do it now. 

Yes. He must do it before his bum melts- else he’ll be a ruby-slippered Saruman singing a queer kind of opera from the wrong tower, and no one wants that. Even if that video WAS funny…

He digs those stump fingers against his chest, struggling numbly over his smoothish, light-hair dusted skin to find the locket he stole. 

Toes are absent. Even the feet themselves dribble outward in waves through the smelt in the silvery pan at his feet.

“The moon goes in first,” he murmurs softly to the TARDIS, holding the locket over the molten silver. “We want a reduction, not a pancake! Not yet. And now the story, as I promised.” 

The silver chain slips from his fingers, and as its shine looms over his face, caressing as it falls, he recalls what he saw in the cave, and sets the steamy sweet gingery mug of hot apple scrumpy to his frothing lips.

No tongue? No problem!

The heat alone is enough to stimulate his memory of the place.

He has entered the cave, picking his way amongst the seaweed and rocks. The darkness of the place was palpable, mutant even, as he peers inside the cauldron depths of that gaping rock maw, searching for any light. 

The blind of white beckons suddenly then, showing him a bit of snowy hair against the black ink.

He is walking, before he knows it.

Before he realises, he is reaching.

His fingers, hale and whole, bring themselves to touch her shoulder. For it –is- the girl.

Oh yes. 

Flaminarixodaparcaftion. 

No. Tzipporah.

Tzipporahkoczeskatilya.

Rassilon’s little girl.

As he touches her, he notes that her hand is frozen above a copper pot with a white porcelain handle.

The pot above a cookfire.

Seven pots and pans adorn the little space, all filled with a liquid that is brewing.

Seven sauces for seven pots for seven cookfires. 

Man and woman and the flame.

How fitting.

In the back, the shadow of the box sleeps. It feels him. It stares.

He ignores it, waving it away as if swatting a fat and stinging fly… and sneezes.

The girl’s pale hand creeps into motion, stirring the white béchamel inside the copper pot.

Her other hand, unladled and yet poised, begs deference from a humble little brown jug-like pot layered within by a thin sheet of gold leaf. The most ancient of pots. A Jomon, filled with a perfect brown sauce mixed with tomato. Espagnole, of course. What else? This she stirs with a plump red rose in its exquisite prime, dripping fat droplets of silvery wet dew that puddle on the film of the thickening sauce without becoming saucy each time she dips and stirs. A secret little smile, just as large as the little pot, graces his lips.

He feels another sudden itch in his nose, despite the fact it’s long since dripped away down his spectacularly bare and Swiss cheesed chest. He sneezes then, and the girl changes tack, following her nature to another pair of pots being heated. 

One pot is not a pot at all, he notes, reviewing its lines carefully, like a hospital sturgeon, is a blackened cast iron sautee pan, full of pale, yellow-white fish sauce, an elegant and long-ripened Veloute seasoned with little specks of herbs and spices.

Beat. 

Its mate, sticking to the spoon in her right hand, is a golden frying pan, full of the rich, enduring yellow of eggy Hollandaise. 

His nose feels that signature need for release again and he caves to it, puntastically enough, his nosebone warming to the needs of nature and beasts as he sniffles once more.

The girl then turns to the last pot, a black iron cauldron filled with the deep-bubbling perfection of dark red with green bits in. A comely tomato sauce.

Of course, he breathes, his mind stepping out of the memory and back into the console room.

His shins are draining into the pan like a halfway decent rendering of beef.

Excellent.

Alchemy can be fun, too, he thinks, as he sneezes for the third and final time, the germs travelling light years as a bit of him settles in every pot.

He opens his Fleshy eyes again; he is back inside the TARDIS.

“A dirty business, but it had to be done,” he murmurs, resting in pooled contentment on the nice thick cushion of the big and favorite chair, “…do you approve, Dear?”


	10. Ichor from Stones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reunion.

The Doctor stands on the cliff, in the Dream, his hand resting in the air as though propped backside up with balloons at the cufflinks. 

He’s not wearing any cufflinks… but he –has- just pushed Jack off the edge.

The boy is safe, for the moment.

Out on a limb.

He spins on his heel in a flash of coattails and looks up, glimpsing the darkening thunderhead growing over him. Behind him.

Or rather, ‘from’ behind him. 

He grabs the outstretched left hand and forces it down to the side, then snaps his wrist slightly, as if turning something.

A sound echoes, the rasp of a clicking mechanism, and gears shift somewhere, clunking in the quiet like great rusted elephant automatons. War machines. 

Gur-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh. 

Garrumph-whirr-whirr.

Clinka-clinka-clinka-clinka-DUNT.

DUNT-DUNT. D-DUNT.

DUNT.

Gur-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh-rursh.

A line draws itself in front of him, a pencil down wonder with no lifted measurement. A trace of a door.

He turns his wrist again, this time to jostle the knob.

He ducks into the quiet dark behind the door, snapping his head back in to say a hurried, “…Some other time, thanks!” to the rushing overhead him-shaped shadow of maddening clouds. It’s not him of course, because him’s down Here. Innit?

Once through, his black boots land on a slurp of wet grass near a landscape-y signage with a horse and a church on it.

EATON.

“Ha!” he says, starting off down a street, “…never been to Eaton before. Wonder who I’ll…”

It’s just an ordinary street.

Just a simple, ordinary line of ordinary houses and shops and the occasional brick building.

He counts them, picking finally the one with a familiar blue door. Obviously.

He’s always wanted to come here.

A cheerful old man opens that most portentous of doors, checking the weather.

“Wilfred!” the Doctor exclaims, slinging his collected rainwater this way and that with an embracing gesture.

The rotund, stubbly old soldier smiles with red eyes and holds the Doctor’s arms just so, bringing them back down to their sides as he rubs them. Wiping at tears, he calls over his shoulder for his daughter to join him.

“Sylvia, he’s here! Let’s get him inside, then. Some tea, lad?”

“Alright, Dad! Bring him in already!” comes Sylvia’s slightly caustic voice, possibly from the room the telly’s in.

The Doctor is unsure. Is Wilfred offering tea or telling Sylvia to make some? Regardless, he comes inside under the man’s light wing of an arm, cracking his neck as the old man, clad in a well tan sweater and a faded reindeer hat, relieves him of his coat.

“You must stay with us! Here, go into the sitting room and we’ll feed you some tea and…”

The Doctor raises his hand in a wordless negative, then looks about for a room.

“I was hoping to stay the night. You see, Dad,” he adds, lifting his shirt to show the man his nipples. One swollen teat beads thick red, the other chalk white, both letting heavily onto the green front rug in time against the pounding of the silver wet rain outside, running over him, dividing his flesh into continents and waters, “… I need a space. Just for the night. I’m waiting for someone… oh! Hello, Mum! You look nice.”

Just then, Sylvia’s blonde-grey hair and saucer-eyes crop up behind the facially flailing old man, proffering a stone mug of tea- her usual frown at his presence delightfully absent for good. She reaches it out to the Doctor, gripping his hand and curving his fingers around the slightly cooler handle gently. 

“Here, son…” she says, hushing his mouth with a finger and tugs him into a room off to one side of the hallway entry, “… come in here.” 

She leaves him in bed, tucked in and silent in the near-dark of the shaded window, guarded against too much moonlight by the cascading edge of a red nightstand lamp’s fuzzy white shade. 

Through the night, they nip back and forth in the hallway, checking on him by watching the shadows on the wall. 

At midnight, his silhouette balls its fingers in the sheets, lurching forward in its sleep and curling rigidly, pushing and pulling and stressing, straining against some force. A confused rower.

In the morning, however, his shadow finally curves for the final time against the pillows, lungs throwing against his ribs with the effort of breath as his body shoves. But he calms. He mouths the air like a strangling fish. But he is alive. And when he has taken the air enough, he slumps back.

His eyelids flutter down. 

As the father and the mother further consider the Doctor’s prostrate body, in a supreme moment of pareidolia, his shaking fingers unclench from the sheets, then seem to reach toward a dried arrangement of fruit tree branches on a nearby table. Those pretty black twigs both obscure his necessaries and infer them as he pants, then plucks a juicy ripe apple from the boughs of what appears to be his…

Again, pareidolia.

Then, raising up the fruit in both hands above himself like a supplicant into view of the moon outside the window, he tries with all great care concentrated in his hoppy forearms and quaking back to set it on the table, and succeeds. Done with it, he sighs, and lets his last sight be the apple that drifts him away. His length of frame wasted and renewed, he pulls the sheets off his body, and lets them drop to the floor, his mind clicking into place.

Into sleep.

Into dream.

Into the long hallway.


	11. Boon Rover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Occam's Taser.

Tumbling through the blackness, Jack’s hands meet something hard, and he stops.

He is curled; his intestines are scrunched up inside him like a folded piece of market meat at the back end of a slicer. 

As he adjusts himself to the lack of light in whatever he’s in, wherever he is, wood grains ingratiate themselves to his face in little rice splinters of grainy annoyance. 

Still, his foot feels warmer than the rest of him, so he pushes out with strangely naked toes against what he assumes is a small wooden door.

He uncollapses backward out of a series of cabinets, in a darkened room smelling of pungent, moth-eaten silk and mold. Beside the recognition of those scents, the deep flavor of decay mixed with simplicity and a spicy hint of opulence floods him instantly.

His current location is an abandoned tatami room.

But he isn’t in Japan.

He isn’t naked, either.

Jack pulls himself to his feet, getting his balance by rolling his shoulders as he notices his surroundings more and more with each needless breath.

“It’s an exercise in futility that has a meaning…” they’d always said such things at the Time Agency training course sessions… “…in order to shield your mind, to train it, you must trick yourself into the realization that you’re no longer in the waking world, and at the same time, provide an anchor there. Breadcrumbs. Use what tools you can. And above all, remember to breathe.” 

His arms and body dangle a black and white striped Mokufu kimono, full of holes. He pokes his fingers through the ragged voids, noting the reddish stains there, some bright and fresh as new paint, some so dark as to be ancient. On the hem he lifts up to the dim light surrounding him, there is a little embroidered man hanging from a gnarled tree with a two-headed coin in its boughs. 

All is hidden behind the stripes.

Suddenly a shadow falls over the room; the sound of slow plodding, heavy and near, echoes from everywhere.

Thd.

Thd.

Thd-thd.

Swish-wish.

The soft sliding of a plain shoji door into its envelope of wood.

Wushwushwush.

Swaaaaaay-scrick!

Swaaaaay-scrick!

Dragging across many doorways, as though several robbers are sacking the place and have all stopped to gaze on his lovely good looks.

Thd-thd.

Thd-thd.

A single hairy paw rounds the last sliding door.

Then a shoulder and neck. The huge head bobs back and forth at a disconcerting wobble, like the frozen ghost of a botched hanging. 

It’s almost in the room.

A bedraggled… albino… furry… Ailuriform? Jack thinks, as his eyes follow the track of the other claw. There’s crusty blood everywhere, stuck to its matted fur like a layer of filth.

And oh yes, it’s dragging a naked body over the softly creaking floorboards.

A body with blue eyes.

Brown hair.

Jack’s eyes grow so wide they dry themselves. His face stinging, he throws himself in silence about the room, clamoring for any route away from the giant panda dragging a facsimile of himself behind it. 

The thing hasn’t quite seen him yet… but that Beamos head is swiveling nearer… where? WHERE?

There! He sees it… dusty, in the right upper corner of the room, partially concealed.

Another door.

He bolts for it.

His feet crunch sick against the wood slats that comprise the floor.

The panda’s head flies about like a madling at the dinner bell; its fangs drip dark blood.

It’s smiling.

As it raises one great sharp-clawed paw to strike, Jack dodges the swing, falling, in his favor, closer to the neglected door and crashes against it, his fingers curling and twisting on the door catch.

It is then that he forgets to breathe.


	12. Janus at the Tree of Wretches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Reluctant Gardener.

Hainishtymion casts blue eyes against the ceiling of Pasmodius’ room.

His fatalist bent is getting the better of his breathing, he decides, so he opens his lungs more, to taste the air more thoroughly, forcing open alveoles more suited to the abrading ache of sweet white powder than the toxic, filtered, sterilized poison of the Citadel.

From his darkened door, as he sprawls back upon his stolen bed, there crawls a crease of light. 

The door slides toward him.

Then it shoves shut again, swiftly.

He prefers real doors, too. 

“I knew you’d come,” he murmurs, reaching out to the new occupant of the room with a long and disheveled arm. He hasn’t bathed since he washed the wall outside with a guard’s blood; the man’s crust is still under his fingernails.

The Tiger woman smiles, her white fur-like scales flashing in little waves of pearl. 

“I saw your beautiful artwork outside, my lovely,” that jewelled body seems to say, swaying toward the bed and draping several claws against his forehead, molding her paw to his face. 

“I knew you waited for me.” Her white voice shimmers in the dark. “Hainish.”

She grabs his blonde hair in a fist, raising him up.

He does not resist.

“Let me see how you’ve grown!” she rumble-purrs in the back of her young throat, her bright black eyes beating like drums, keeping time with his breathing. With his hearts.

“So you approve of my plans?” he says, his eyes welling nearly shut with heavy, salted tears.

Her laugh is not a pretty one. 

A hard-shooting spring of sharp gravel, it screws her lips upward in a rictus, revealing sharp fangs.

“Your plans?” 

Her silvery head tilts like a considering bird. She repeats herself.

“Your plans…yours? You thought all that was you? All of this, you?”

Hainish revels then, in the bells.

So many bells that chime from her glorious throat.

It is ecstasy.

And yet, a small shade of doubt asks from somewhere…

-Who is she laughing at?-

Suddenly she raises the claw holding Hainish, lifting him from the bed, a snarl gathering across her muscles.

She draws him back, dangling him like a bruised toy.

Back, and back, and back.

Soon he is flying.

Soon he is against the wall.

Two broken teeth spill from his mouth, and some blood.

He coughs.

More blood.

The shimmer he’s been using fizzles and pops behind his ear. The small ornament he fashioned, an earring, falls away, crumbling.

The laugh. That smirk. Her face.

“Heal yourself, you dense little troll,” she says flatly, shaking out her fur, shedding silver scales in a brilliant rain until sterling and smooth are no longer her color, “…these children need reassurance. You’ll be my pet.” 

She is wrinkled now. Wrapped in a yellow salwar. Dark olive skin. A greasy strand of grey hair trembles from her balding pate, tumbling down.

“You are not my Mother…” he says softly, staring limply at the floor.

Her gaze, upon him for only a fraction of time, looms black and shiny, like a stone formed of organ blood. She raises her claw again, but in that breath of space… there bumps across those eyes leaking death a solitary golden mote that cries, “Look here!”

The Doctor’s gift to him.

She blinks, backing away as though something has entered her eye. It has, of course.

Then she is outside, walking away down the corridor, stalking away from the tall new guard.

Hainish’s eyes widen.

He must warn the Valeyard.

But the Mines…

Oh Rassilon, the Mines…

“Ahem.” A familiar voice springs forth, from the hallway. The timbre of it seems more even than before…

It is the guard, isn’t it?

“Nishi.”

His useless Kenny’s pet name for him.

Gutarriezknindracastorblyledgespillioth’s soft melodious tenor bubbles from the lips of the silver and red body-suited insect.

He’s not even whispering. 

Hainish watches as green hair falls like silk from the red helmet, cascading. A flash of blue paper gleams from the inside, for a second… the fingers cling to a zipper, and soon the whole suit is slipping to the floor, undressing the ivory-slipped bones, naked and beautiful, of an androgynous waif he recognizes every well-turned corner of.

Kenny’s lavender eyes gleam across Hainish’s face. 

Knindra. Hainish toys with the syllables of his old lover’s name, wistful and remembering.

Kenny says nothing, but opens his long bony hand and blows on his white white fingers, opening a loosely-wrapped packet with just the force of his breath.

A fine pale dust settles through the room, flying around Hainish. A cloud of dust.

A cloud.

Dust everywhere.

The room needs a cleaning, Hainish decides…

Then he is gone, bones and all.

The Namaste Nerada have done what the Doctor asked of them.

“Go back to your books now, all right?” Kenny says softly, dropping the helmet on the ground with a hollow clack, “I’m going to fetch the Doctor. He’s promised to fix it one more time for us, and then we’re on our own. Go- the debt must be recorded. Do not let her find you. And she must not find him before he finds Hainish.”

The silver sleek lines of a powering blaster percolating in his hand, he thinks of the hidden storage room where the TARDIS was parked. There should still be travel clothes there, waiting for him, as per the Doctor’s insructions.

As he considers his route through the Citadel, the white dust swirls once around him, then flies away, up through the tiny seams in the ceiling. 

Soon Knindracastorblyledgespillioth is running through the white halls, down through the levels, beating the corner-skirting guards over the head with candy-colored chairs and vaulting over scurrying Time Lords.

The egress the woman Flamina used before is only a few more levels down...

He must reach the Shrine of the Pythia before –she- does.

He must reach the Doctor.


	13. Bad Panda Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> T-Cell Ceremony.

Jack is running through the halls.

See Jack run.

Jack is running through the halls.

Wood creaks beneath his naked feet, gripping and grabbing and tearing at his heels and exposed toes.

Splinters bring up little wells of blood that smear from him onto the floor planks. 

Old boards, dry boards, dismal and wet and dusty and cold and so dry.

Paradox as foundation.

His hands reach out wildly to his sides, buffeting screens with grisly tears and little screeches of blood.

The panda is coming.

The panda is coming. 

The panda is com…

His fear reeks from him like a rampaging elephant, plodding nearer with the force of several steam engines and a comely fat goose.

Terror leads him, feeds him round the spool of another corner, toenails catching, tripping over a body or two. Or three. One is wearing a blue kimono. One is small, wearing a tidy shirt. One is in a pink hoodie. One is all in silver, enshrouded. Embalmed. One or two of them might be his, he realises, as he stumbles away.

The plodding comes, continuing, rain hitting heavy against a flimsy paper parasol.

Plunt.

Plunt.

Thd.

Plunt.

Plunt.

Thd.

Shraaaaaake.

Plunt.

Plunt.

Shraaaaaaake.

A fingernail comes off against the rotting, half-eaten walls of wood, and Jack cries out.

“Igh-ah! Damn it, it’s gonna get… I have to…”

A soft breeze blows against his ankles from no foreseeable direction, kissing the skin and the bones.

There is a tapestry close to his line of sight, faded and hanging there, prominent and forlorn in the shade of the corridor. 

He can see no door outside, and the panda is gaining.

His blue eyes dry themselves on this tapestry, staring at every corner, every line, every pale and painted leaf of the apple tree adorning it. It is the same tree embroidered on the Mokufu he’s dressed in. The thick fingers of gnarled branches climb out sporadically from the off-center bushes where the tree’s roots are set on the once-cream silk; he can see a shadow falling over it, like the casting of days in a sunward Mason’s niche. 

A glint crawls toward him, across the floor; it is the lopsided hook of the panda’s outstretched claw, one of several it intends for his face, he imagines, as he grabs up the tapestry and touches it, hoping for some hidden scroll or catch in the weight of its disintegrating hems. 

As he is staring at the tree, Jack does not hear the panda trundle forward into the room.

Plunt.

Plunt.

Thd-thd.

Shraaaaaake. 

Jack turns around, pressing his vertebrae against the tapestry, clutching it in bloody fingers missing half their nails.

He feels the steam of hot breath on his face.

The tip of one claw is touched to his forehead, as though the creature is counting. Preparing.

Tik.

Tik.

Tik.

He opens his eyes, his feet planted firmly on the rough fibers of the mildew-woven tatami that haphazard the floor of this space, the last of the rooms.

Then he opens his eyes again, as the crazed panda’s other claw rises like a crescent summer moon over his face. The paw blooms silver, the great palm a black, triumphant lotus decorated in squeezes of muscle.

A last clack of the positioned claw against Jack’s forehead beckons the sweat from his face.

Cold grips him by the lungs, like heavy air from a furnace.

The claw rises for a fourth time, and as his eyes follow the line of shiny keratin up, it…

Tik.


	14. Step on a Crack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kali Dearest.

“Stop!” the real guard quakes from a pile of half-pulled on silvery uniform trousers, levering a charged pistol at the fleeing Kenny, as Mamlaurea exits the room of the man calling himself Assassin.

Her yellow silks sway in a chorus of floral bells against her brown wrinkles as she takes his helmeted face in her hands and brings him close to her, close enough for her stolen body’s warm incarnate breath to fog the man’s helmet. 

“We will let him go, child,” she murmurs softly, gazing across the marble corridor cutaway at the fleeing shadow of Knindracastorblyledgespillioth, Kenny, who is escaping down the stairwells.

“We will have the patience of a spinner of threads at her lacework.”

Her eyes grow soft. Her face, too. Her darkening eyebrows lift like two benevolent tree branches, sheltering whatever her eyes rest upon. 

Her toes and nails grow blue-black, like carrots whose roots have gone sour. The black travels upward, touching her shins, orchestrating an unrelieved climate of black around her person. Her skin is greying as she cups the guard’s face with her other hand, darting a slender fork of curved tongue back and forth, and her wrinkles fade into eggplant smoothness, like a raisin in reverse.

“W-w-who a-are you?” the guard cries, his tongue lolling as her clawlike fingers clench his neck and jaw.

Her bright fever eyes become as polished jets in their sockets; she turns them on him, and he is afraid.

White wings spread from her lithe back in a great wave, and fear coils her newest plaything’s guts like a virus of the bowels.

Holding him by the chin, out before her like a sacrifice, she steps out of the shadow of the door and smiles white fangs at two Time Lords staring from the other side of the cutaway. 

“Why, We are the Benevolent One, the Pythia!” she whispers, a soundless cackle in the dark, and she poses her dread fingers viperously, slithering in place, “…We are your Mother! Rejoice in Us. Rejoice, for We…!”

Krik-rak!

Her body shudders and folds unnaturally backward, as though a great hole has sucked her spinal column through her stomach.

Her headdressed head of black snakes snaps around and her lips give a sharp and pearly snarl to the empty air, as if chiding a ghost.

The guard drops from her fingers to her naked blue-black feet; he crawls away on his bum, the shiny marble floor squealing under his scraping fingers.

“We see you!” she rages against the silent hallways, her inward-turning gaze gluing to the backs of her eyes some other space and time. And what does she see?

Oh, just a smiling young man in tweed and stout boots and a blue button down too sizes too large, walking in Eaton, his foot perched precariously over one of the grassy, cracked divisions in a chalky length of sidewalk. 

There is an overlarge flute in his hand, which had been in his mouth till he’d chosen to look up.

His grin grows wider, and his lips flow apart.

“Hello,” he murmurs half to himself, his eyes low and pale peridots as he covers his stomach with a hand, before his bounding fey chin quickly tucks his face away into the shade of a lapel. 

“…tag! You’re it.”


	15. Nut and Knut

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Walking Crow.

He sneezes at the itch of green grass edging its way under his coat like the rough of an offending tag.

“How long have we known each other?” His murmur appeals to the blue sky above before coming back down and settling into the countryside of the hill for a short nap of sorts, along with the rest of him. 

He looks at that above, as always, finding golden sparks of lady’s eyes instead of stars, and blue whorls of fingers that brush his cheek instead of empty space that doesn’t. As always.

As always.

The sky says nothing.

As always.

His fingers touch his bowtie, out of nervous habit. He drops them down again. His back is in the grass. The blue-gold sky is above him. He is safe. They are safe, together and here. All is well.

“You say that I’ve always had you. That you stole me. But how long,” he breathes the words like candles whispering; they flake away from him and move up to Her in little flights of ash, burning holes in the air.

“…how long have You had Me? It had to be torture, awaiting myself-with-the-wander-of-an-idiot for all those sullen years. What did you do for fun, way up on that hill, before I found you, and you decided to take me away from all that?”

Perhaps in answer, something falls on his head, tapping him square on the brow and sticking on his lip like a dry, dusty raindrop.

Th.

Th-th.

He picks at his mouth, swirling his tongue around himself; the thing is warm from the sun, and slightly hairy. His tongue slips closer to the object. But it won’t…quite…

Poke.

His tongue slobbers away from the object, and it jumps down his throat. 

He opens his mouth to the sky, then bends over the grass, trying to cough with his whole body because the ordeal is making his throat rasp with such a very large itch he may threaten it with tea later.

But then, two more of the little things fall down, riding the straight and narrow all the way to his belly, just like that first enterprising traveller.

“Koff. They feel like… they feel like seeds,” he chokes, picking up one of the things from the ground; evidently there was a rain of them while he was busy. 

The one on his finger sticks, like the others, and, his throat free of such clinginess for the moment, he looks down at the occupation of his fingertip, his wide, delighted eyes casting a quasi-shade for the little thing. 

Small, and hard, and covered in little stickers, as though a porcupine used curling hair gel, then made love with a dried up grey watermelon and had several thousand children; one of whom was in his hand, being stared at by his drippy, red-rimmed, irritated eyes and somewhat itchy chin. 

He scratches his nose, then bows to the overhead blue with all the gold bits in.

“Well, it turns out that everything is the Now, after all… but yeah, carrot seeds! Three does sound about porridge, Old Girl. But you’re right,” he adds blithely, slapping his thigh as his trousers begin to grow tight and the joints of his legs wither up into hard ball-knobs,”…I should go and check on the kids, shouldn’t I? Well I’m doing it, I’m doing it.” 

Black wings bunch through his coat in a respectable flurry; the tweed disappears. 

And his hair grows into a straw hat. 

And his body is a bird’s.

He lifts his big crow leg, careful not to get his long beak caught under his knee.

“With my nice stout boots, I ought to make his dream in no time flat, my girl!” he caws, out a giant silvery crow-mouth with seed-temptingly large nasal cavities. 

Then he is tromping away, across the grass.

In the distance, suddenly there is a flowing field of gold; his destination.

He heads himself in that direction, going there, in the grand grand leaping steps of a very big boy.

Or a giant talking crow with a bowtie. 

Wearing boots, and a good straw hat.


	16. Krahe des Sturme

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oestre Sunday.

Despite himself, the light closes in on him.

On what he was, and to some extent, on Hainishtymion, as his head dangles backward against the wall of his room.

His eyes close.

But soon, so soon after it, he opens those eyes to the break of a lavender egg over runny gray and water purple tear-paper.

This is what constitutes a sunset, here, in this funny little place.

Feels like where he came from.

All these purples… they’re the earliest memory he has. It’s a nice sort of day, here… the wind is gentle, there is water to drink, caught in little pools against the swerving black grass with leaf-like blades and stems of opportunistic fingernail.

The landscape always moves on him. It bounces the horizon like that good old line is a too long sausage in a too small pocket; the thing is always coming out.

He turns over, feeling the nice black grass beneath his naked body. 

Sometimes the grass shakes.

Sometimes it sways in an improper wind, as though something is riling the stolid rocks beneath the valley into a placidity of soup. 

The pace of the place- it dips sometimes, back and forth, left, right, always along with the place.

The ground must be alive.

There is a mountain in the distance that waxes and wanes with the tides of the fickle black grass, bobbing, twisting, turning, a queer yellow peak with a rounded top, like the banana end of a sundae. He fancies it’s made of basket, when the nights are short and the cold almost catches him.

Every now and then, too, the land seems to grow suddenly, to the left and right, calculating a surge in population perhaps, or reveling in some celestial wind, as the entire world loops up in half rings at the sides, fluffing like a blanket before flapping back down again. Almost like the flight of an aviform.

But there are no birds as huge as a planet, and in those impossible mouths, no lavender jewels as big as satellites with greenish reddish stars inside like suns.

And the flash of red he thinks he sometimes sees against the black grass on the other side of the yellow peak is not a bowtie. It is the cold, playing tricks with his long toes and through his toes, his mind.

Tonight is one of those cold nights. But the black grass is warm; at night, especially lately, the feathery blades puff out the gold of metal pollen, like venerable fat fungi.

The horizon is turning gold, too.

Swaying.

Catching the yolk-light from the lavender egg currently hiding behind the yellow peak. 

Soon, Hainishtymion forgets that he is naked, that he is pale and pale-haired and curled in the black grass, and turns over, his fists bunching loosely on tufts of the stuff.

Inevitably, his thumb, frequent and sleepy, sees fit to bum a stealthy ride past lip and gum to see the horses, and he sleeps.


	17. The Robbes-Pierre of Longinus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sacrificial Lam.

Rassilon sighs as he looks down the plank.

 

 Several attendants in white, pushing trolleys and chairs, are shuffling by him, around him, the flow of people like fish in a stream.

 

He grabs one woman by the shoulder, smiling a blank, unthreatening smile at her.

 

Project reassurance, he tells himself glibly as he gauges the woman’s reactions. It’s been a while since he’s had to remind himself of how to act to get information.

 

The small, one-eyed heart of a face responds as he thought it would, blinking its one blue eye and shuddering, the short worm’s-beak mouth wheeling with resonant odd clicks and catches and whirs.

 

Wheeek-t-t!

 

Wheeek!

 

Wheeek!

 

…

 

…

 

Wheeek! T-t.

 

“I’m sorry sir, but the Hospital is closed to visitors; We’ve had an incident. Please go back to your ship!”

 

She scurries off, her thin hands driving off with a hovering chair full of a pile of grey, slimy, occasionally bubbling patient.

 

A Turelo woman, he surmises, shifting himself forward through the rushing crowd.

 

A man whose brilliant pate is an almost diacritically mottled golden ball strikes a heavy foot across his path, his long marble fingers five in number and dangling, the palm pensive and… strangely empty.

 

Rassilon frowns; a spark is ignited.

 

“Did you lose your child?” he asks, curving the outlines of his eyebrows at just the right height, so that even he may be considered a paragon of merciful concern, “I could look for her…”

 

Those words surprise him; he feels even the man jump a bit at the severity of his earnest.

 

Golden Ball Head shakes his orb at him; it’s piteous, somehow; piteous in the sense that somewhere on that golden bulb, there is a flash of metallic pity running circumferences away from the sun. Or toward it. And for whom?

 

“I am a Geldoracht- the spheres on our necks crack and sprout, feeding our offspring from within. As to your inquiry, there were instructions left with the Desk about leaving that room occupied, I believe; on the third level perhaps? I was here with my wife. I would have gone to see about it, but I…”

 

 He shuffles off, leaving the Time Lord alone behind and again, in the narrow strait of ongoers.

 

Rassilon hears a gasp slip slightly aft and starboard as he takes a step.

 

Krraaak.

 

He turns, blue eyes searching for the sheer height of the Geldoracht as a visual reference to how far he’s come from the nondescript lobby.

 

But the Geldoracht is kneeling on the ramp, his marble hands slack and supplicant. The golden ball atop his neck has a crack too; it reveals a whiteness.

 

Pieces fly from the ball; the body jerks, arms flailing with each new fissure as though the man is being puckered by some sniping projectile.

 

But then!

 

 A small hand escapes the crack, gripping the edge of the man’s head like a hatching chick. The hand adorns an arm. The arm adorns a little girl in a green dress, her head a shiny green marble. She climbs like a twitching bird from the wreckage, then turns to apply her tiny fingers to the broken shell of her father’s head.  Her own young ball of a head bobs briefly at Rassilon. Then she skips away.

 

Rassilon stares at the husk of the Geldoracht’s body, sitting like a standing stone now in the river of people escaping the Hospital.

 

“Third level? The crying sound…?” he asks a passing metalliform Vorpal Flyrgot with a medical cruce on its tiny adamantite body.

 

Its small, spinning knife wings click to a stop at once, the circle of blade-like flight appendages rising to a crescendo just fingerlengths from his face. A globe appears. It beams a light from the rusted red cruce on its carapace to the lines of Rassilon’s face, humming loudly, “First right by the Lobby and Vending, left to the stairwell, down to the right and then take an up up left down right turn,” it whirs, twisting around once in full greeting before floating on a bit up the ramp.

 

“And what was the trouble? Why is everyone leaving?” he remembers to ask aloud, finally. But their eyes, their postures… it is in them that he finds it. There is, he has found, a certain look in the eyes of refugees from an attack. That vision of destruction is in these eyes.

 

The hospital has been attacked, somehow. And the attendants have no more time for him.

 

He follows those instructions, passing the shiny white Lobby sparsely decorated with floating root-ball plants. Then he crosses by a Vending Machine Shop full of half-open packets of some sort of edible red or white or green or orange gel. Some of the packets are leaking onto the floor, making a mess.

 

And the gels seem to be crawling away.

 

How queer.

 

The stairs are somewhat cramped, but he manages the height difference by lurching forward, dodging the medi-bots with painted on yellow happy faces bobbing at him to leave.

 

“Sir, we must insist you leave,” they counter in tin voices, reprimanding him with little needles, “… the rime crust is spreading over this section! Sir!”

 

He waves them away like flies, and they fall at his compulsion.

 

“Hmph,” he sighs, glad to be rid of them as he turns down another corridor.

 

Rime crust?

 

Ice.

 

Could it be?

 

Spying the last stretch, he draws his own blue note from his pocket.

 

It says,

 

Room 512.

 

Mind the snowmaiden.

 

“All right,” he says aloud, listening for any sounds as he nears the simple, opaque glass rectangle of white door.

 

At the end of the corridor, he looks up, as he hears a high-pitched, crunching something scrape and scrape and scrape inevitably closer, inside the room.

 

shrik.

 

Shrik, shrik.

 

Shrik.

 

Shrik, shrik.

 

He reaches for the roundish door knob.

 

It sears his fingertips with a biting, shearing cold, peeling him, flaking off his skin and gluing itself to his flesh like the sleep of Ymir.

 

Without looking at his hand, he reaches for the doorknob again.

 

Gripping the icy metal.

 

Again, the crawl of dread blue-white frost threatens his fingers with frozen fire.

 

He turns the knob, and hears the quiet cry of a scrabbling, obstructed throat.

 

Glurb-glurb!

 

Glurb!

 

Glurb!

 


	18. Death and the Buffered Analgesic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over Easy.

Ten hours later and no stew.

 The Valeyard pushes himself up from the litter again, holding his legs up to avoid the.... 

Then he snorts, shoves some air from his lungs, and touches one foot to the stone tiles anyway. 

Ice fractures out from his bare toes, freezing the veins of amberite in the flooring tiles into little gold rivers of yellow snow. 

“Do you want something to eat besides me?” he muses softly, his fingers idly poking and prodding his freezing abdomen for proof of residence.

 No answer. 

 He stretches, then plods across the room to a chest of drawers. His muscles propel him as far as the middle of the room, then freeze up as though they’ve lost oil, his abdominals in particular. He can feel the ice shifting across their covering of skin, frosting their edges like a cold morning’s kiss on a lucky clover.

  He rubs arms aching with cold, hunching forward awkwardly.

 Then he tries to straighten again.

 Suddenly his mental vision is assailed by a thick and twisting maw lined with a thousand gnashing fangs clanging around and around, clicking together and apart with mechanical, meat-grinding precision.

 He lurches and falls, wild-eyed, his elbows banging against the tannish chest of drawers.

 “Watch yourself, child,” he gasps, breathlessly catching an elbow about his trembling midsection as it languidly drips cool sweat, “…I warn you, if you don’t play nice I will think seriously about letting you house-sit my… AGH!”

 His womb crimps suddenly and sharply inward, imploding down into a tiny point around the embryo in his belly; it drives his body forward, his feet dragging forward as his belly strangles itself further into a hard ball against his spine, crumpling in unholy reverse like a paper ball on rewind.

 His face meets the door, cracking his nasal cavity.

 SKRIK.

 His mouth flies open to scream, the edges of his lips stretching beyond limit, carving new lines in his face.

 The skin of his mouth protests as he draws a heavy breath into already heaving lungs, his chest grating against itself as he seethes.

 “No more chocolate for you,” he manages, and his hearts ram his ribs.

 This thing... it’s going to kill him.

 Then it’s going to wear him, like a puppet.

 Like the Midnight Monster.

 No.

No, no no no no.

Just… no.

 He swallows and rests against the door for a moment, drawing in big gulps of air with a loose jaw to fuel his next physical expenditure.

 Soon, it’ll be time to buy new clothes – he can feel the thing growing inside him, dividing, stretching him, the hard tumour of it stretching across the surface of his abdomen like a thick twist of gall on a tree branch.

  New clothes are always nice, he reasons, snapping out of it, but he desperately needs the thought of it growing so fast to be a rotten pear on the ground of his hardwood flooring, and not a ripe one, dangling from his psyche’s beanstalk.

 “I need to eat, even if you don’t,” he says, softening his tone until it closely resembles the Doctor’s most revolting soothe. He smiles, showing the white of his teeth as he adds, “… Daddy needs some food, sweetheart. Shall we go to the Kitchens then and sample the soup? We must keep up our strength.”

 A happy gurgle bubbles up to him, shooting waves of bliss through the muscles of his pelvis and groin, plumping his buttocks and wetting his nethers- he doesn’t dare attempt to shutter all his nerve impulses at this point- only the ones that still serve him will do. Like the ones he’s using to plot willful destruction of the naughty bit of natto blooming in his gut.

 Even so, he’s nearly at his limit, underneath this alien control. His body is shivering; if the thing inside him doesn’t acknowledge his acquiesce soon, he might black out. Or it might make him.

 “Stew it is, then,” he breathes softly, having regained enough strength to be snide out loud as he rubs his stomach, caressing the little hard lump bulging under his fingers that wasn’t there before. Did it move just now? Oh goddess, how revolting.

 Hainish, his little pet idiot, will have to wait a while longer.

 Too bad, he thinks, rubbing the unwanted bump as he sways slack-footed and weak-ankled out the door, clinging to the wall as he thinks on where to place his feet next to distract himself from the fact that the ugly roots squirming through the walls of his womb, strengthening themselves, feasting on his borrowed body.

He’s being sucked away, down a straw.

 It’s what he gets, he supposes, for that stunt with the Ponds, by the Lake. 


	19. Breakfast Epiphanies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Art of Compromise.

“Ah, stone seats and gardens! No birds though,” the Valeyard says softly, eyeing the many slim stone perches which line the monks’ eating hall. He moves to stand in front of one of them, tapping the pitted stone with his finger. “… Oi!” 

Then he settles himself on the bench below the icy perch and slides down the length, all the way to the big stew pot at the end of the long table. 

As his face whizzes by the rows and rows of stone pedestals bearing the bird perches, he notices something. 

One of the perches is covered in a sheath of ice taller than he is. 

Lifting midway between the height of a nearby tree and the top of the perch, there is a small winged creature with a bit of mane around its face, frozen in midair. A greenish bluish lion bird. Its little furry face, with dangling red tendrils on either side, stares out of the whitish column of cerulean-tinted ice at him. Waiting and still.

 He pats his stomach and sighs, darting bright eyes back and forth like a caught thief.

 “Did you do that, my little pudding?” he murmurs, caressing his belly again absently as he stares into the bird’s one visible eye; he shoves a finger at it, projecting nonchalance. “…do you think the stew is still warm? Well, let’s us just go and see, shall we then? Hrm?”

 He wraps his fingers around the heavy black iron ladle and pulls it around as if to stir, testing.

  The liquid in the big cauldron gives off a succulent heat, steaming readily up into his face; it wets his forelock, and the scent of spices wafts through him. The spices, like the cauldron and the thick stew it holds, are dark in his nostrils, a rich blend of salt, sweet, spicy and sensuous- a perfect complement to his mood.

 He grabs an empty bowl, then dusts off the bench behind his bum, forgetting the fact he’s just slid down it, dusting it already with his backside. He sits.

 He makes a face, snarling his features in a caricature of the Doctor’s more disgruntled moments; it’s all for the Child’s benefit, of course.

 As he plops a wooden spoon he found near the cauldron into the bowl full of dark, porridge-y grey swill and bright blue flecks and chunks of pale spiral something, he mutters, “… smells like a lot of nasty vegetables, muffin. Shall we dig in then? It’s the only thing suitable for Daddy’s hatch for metres around. I think I shall, really.” He pauses to scratch his head, digging his fingers into his limp and floppy hair, “… now be a good…. baby… demon… bean… thing and don’t make me vomit.”

 An hour later, the sun is higher, a boiled duck’s egg. But the ice ignores that, too.

 His body is warmer, if marginally; at least there’s no frost forming in the ridges of his abs now. He can tell because his darkening veins are expanding under his skin. They’re turning blacker…

 He blinks.

 “Well, now; that was a nice breakfast, wasn’t it my cheery little pumpkin?” the Valeyard says, patting himself. He touches his rump, suddenly mindful of the damp cold mess he made of his trousers when he slid down the bench. “Daddy needs some new clothes! We’re off to the shops for some proper gray silk and a stiff cotton. If popping you out is gonna kill my prospects,” he reasons, walking out of the eating hall and down toward the central T of doors that lead into the Museum, “…I can at least do it in a derby. Plus, I need a sturdy stick for the ice capades. We wouldn’t want Daddy’s little rice cake to go sliding out the toaster because he’s fallen on the nasty hard ice, would we?”

 No answer; only, a shard of frosty nerves grabs him by the tailbone.

 Meow, he muses in the vaults of his secret mind. He’s going to need all nine lives to survive this.

 Suppressing a shiver, he wanders out the doors.

 Behind him, the crawling blue ice follows in his footsteps, growing along his shadow and out from his heels like a dog he does not see, a wake of deathly flowers forged of pale bifrost carbuncles and sterling.

 


	20. soffite d'argile et de têtes d'or

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An Overarching Dream.

What was it she had always told her students? 

Ah, yes. 

“It’s like sifting flour to make bread.”

 But, she has not seen flour, nor tasted. Nor touched. 

Nor smelled the baking of it into bread.

 Not she, or any of her students who have never left Gallifrey. 

Bread was written about in the books she used to teach from, in lines and lines and lines of stiff, rigid description. But she has never made it. It is what the Doctor meant that day, she thinks silently… that day he became Lord President and acted insane to derail suspicion, then lowered the transduction barrier and pretended to betray them all, secretly defending Gallifrey against two invasions in the process. And he used That Thing to do it… rendering his personal memory of the event forever lost.

 Poor boy.

 “It’s like warm snuggles and sunshine you can eat,” rambles an overhead voice, “…just breathe it in, Borusa… “

 Annoying boy.

 Borusa considers opening her eyes, and then harumphs, opening her mouth instead.

 “I have no need of lecture from a youngling of –mine- in a subject with which I am thoroughly conversant, Doctor; I am the one who taught –you- to do this, after all…” she breathes, drawing the smell of familiar countryside into her lungs.

 She thinks of her family’s old grey cottage, set in the elder bosom of hills the color of seepen blood.

 She dreams of that thorny little patch of black brush in the back corner of the estate’s small garden.

 Her thoughts flick through her memories like a film being viewed; she picks one, settles it in a corner of her brain and attends the frame of it as if placing a painting.

 But paintings, too, she has never seen.

  Had never seen, before Leaving with the Doctor.

 It must be how they all feel, the first time.

 She picks that notion up, dusts it, and sets it aside on a nondescript shelf.

 No time to wonder about wondering.

 “So I can leave you alone then, Borusa?” the voice murmurs, a quietness coloring the offhand twist of phrase; it gives Borusa a perfect glimpse of the grin its owner must be wearing.

 “Obviously. Take your rest, you pandemic jollyhop,” she mutters, grinning herself at his presumptive impetuousness, “…I’ll find our objective in this place. There are things I need to see again.”

 “I saw what you did there. Well, all right, if you say so… even still, be careful, Old Bean,” the Doctor tumbles out a soft, sad, approving laugh, before retracting himself from her presence, his mental retreat washing over her, toes to teeth, like a curl of sea dropping away from a stalwart cliff.

 When the biting, salty sea wind starts again up over her skin, when his long, gentle square hand no longer touches her shoulder, she knows he has completely retreated, and that she is free to conduct her investigation and observation of the subject at hand.

 “That memory of mine,” she adds, opening her eyes and sitting up. “It’s bound to be around here somewhere.”

 She finds herself to be naked on the red grass. To her left, there is a white shift, trousers and a blue sash, lain out carefully- the Doctor’s sentimental offering, an apparent jest.

 Heaving her solvent child-breast at the thought of her former student being so thoughtful, obstinate, and such a busybody, she reaches out and grabs the clothes, shrugging them on. They’re pleasantly loose, she realises, and as she probes the hem, her fingers stumble over a large tag tied with purple twine. It reads:

 Virgin Sacrifice Robe:  -1 Luck, Summon Holy (single use; automatic on K.O. unless Blue Sash of Relative Displacement is equipped, whereupon effect block-transfers onto itself, resulting in recursive occlusion)

Fisherman’s Trousers:  +3 Charm Whale (collect Fisherman’s Shoes and Fisherman’s Lantern for Sailor Jesus of Tonberry costume change)

Blue Sash of Relative Displacement:  +9 Perception (unless Virgin Sacrifice Robe is equipped)

 Her eyes narrow into blades at her former student’s inane idea of a joke, then crystallize silver on the surrounding lush ruby foliage down the way from the cottage; she again sees exactly what she expected to find there, yet she is surprised.

 Her fingers tighten on her unreal chest; two thundering dreamt hearts crash against aching incorporeal ribs.

 Beneath an orange backdrop of two ripened, bloody suns, white fingers of forest scamper across the paper cut horizon line, drinking at the edge of an ancient sea of adamantine waves.

 And in the crescent-shaped clearing of her youth as a boy in these pearl hills of rolling limbs, a solitary TT capsule.

 But it is not the one Borusa expected.

 Nor is it the color.

 Old eyes narrow further at this. Still, her feet recall the way better than she does, and bound her forward, upward onto pensive tippy girl-toes; they remember themselves to echo through the red grass like a newborn tafelshrew prancing in the first sunlight of spring… as her hair blooms around her, behind her, before her, a ribbon of pale gold silk as she bolts across the field.

She runs.

 And runs.

And runs.

 She cannot help herself.


	21. The Last Golden Apple of Hesperides

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My True Dads.

And the bright blue eyes with flecks of grey and green lie unoccupied, a surety that the only living creature here now is struggling to crown from the strange white tree growing from the dead doll’s empty husk.

River Song’s Flesh became a tree… perhaps the ice caught her before she could give birth, and her essence ejected from the borrowed Flesh, directing the material to protect the creature she was encompassing.

 “So this is where you’ve been hiding…” he murmurs, looking upon the heaving bulb of the white tree’s vacuous roots; it seems a great sap-thing, full of such bulbs- strange that only the one seems to call to him.

 To him.

 It is then he remembers, and touches the empty place near his breast, clutching cloth instead of precious projectionist silver.

 Glurb!

  Glurb-glurb!

 Something hurts in his chest. Something burns.

 That sound, it aches across his vision like a rain of writhing acid.

 Darkness quakes over him, and he is blind.

Terror rules his features as he trembles without sight before the bed.

 His hands flash out like broken lampposts, prodding for the light, with bruised fingers like crisp leaves; they break underfoot.

 He lashes out left, right, over, under, laying his digits to the chill air in the hope of some release.

 Melty thickness sinks around his big slender hands, and he dives forward, feeling swallowed by a war.

 So cold, he cannot feel his feet against the floor, in boot or stocking.

He can feel the ice as it crawls up his leg, gnashing its spidery teeth along tensor and vein.

He claws through the mush, down and down and down, deeper into the white he can no longer see.

 There is nothing, nothing to hold, nothing to see. His knuckles are ice drops; they wish to stop moving.

 But then.

Then there is a knocking in his heightened ear, of tiny bones in a tiny wrist.

 Kk-kk.

 kk-kk.

 At this he grasps.

 He pulls.

Suddenly, a whirlpool of light.

 A brown velvet rabbit with green buttons for eyes and a smart purple bowtie adorning its neck stares out like a pall from a window floating in a sunny blue sky. With long paws, it shoves the window open, stuffing a white and wiggling bundle into Rassilon’s arms while its pasted on pink candy heart nose snuffs wriggly circles over its shoulder, out of nerves.  Or fear. Still, the air from its breath warms the frost on the glass, and Rassilon feels heat radiate through him like warm stones thrown into a pile of snow.  The thing in his arms sniffs, wiggling once.

 Then the rabbit, window and all, is gone.

He opens his eyes, clutching something small in his coat, and falls back, away from the bed and the ice, and the white mud tree, full of cracks.

It isn’t writhing anymore.

 His arms are full now, and he’s missing a boot.

Careful not to draw the attention of the ice, he follows his path in retrograde, stepping into his footsteps on the now snow-covered floor, beating a retreat back into the hallway.

 


	22. Catch a Silent Runner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Point of Algae.

His curls spread out, a lace tablecloth before him.

 

He is melting.

 

Has melted.

 

His face floats in the tin-contained sea of hot metal.

 

The metal is bubbling, spewing up, leaping out of the pan as he slips away.

 

From his mouth, there dangles the comforting brown blunt of a long cigarillo.

 

The ash-bitten burnt end is still somewhat lit, judging by the sick stringy line of smoke cajoling it with wispy kisses.

 

As his ears slide under the silvery yellow melt, he smiles.

 

Rassilon should be retrieving his hearts’ desire, a lovely fragrant little baby-shaped brie, just… about…

 

His chin dips below the liquid, sizzling briefly.

 

Bzt. Krk-fz.

 

Finally, finally, someone else… no, -everyone- will hear them.

                                                                                                                                                                      

Fluid fills his nostrils, flowing. Burning the little protein hairs on the ends of his nerves, the Torque-batter folds over, all the way up the yellow brick nodes of Ranvier and the Perrier of the axons to gently wash against the threshold of his once bright brain in a thick drizzle, a welcome rainfall. It will soon become a flood. Despite a luscious lack of tympanum now, still he hears the beads of liquid, knocking, knocking… and decides, again and then and once more, to let them in.

 

All those voiceless prayers.

 

…now.

 

He closes blue eyes on the world, pondering one last thought as the livid steam from his turning tears sweetens the dark of the Old Girl’s library room with the scent of cooling nut brittle.

 

Now they will be answered.


	23. Recipe for Oubliette and Omelette

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baby Bird.

Rassilon can feel something squirming in the bunting he carries.

 

As his footsteps tremble up the ramps to the bright hangar, the large space diminished now of all departing ships, he spies a single hanger-on; that standing beacon.

 

The Blue Lady.

 

The TARDIS.

 

It is done, then.

 

His arms settle the bundle against his chest, easing the white weight of swollen cloth into its place near the middle of him, the waypoint between his two thumping hearts.

 

The TARDIS doors creak open for him as he nears her; but as he sets inside, he finds a quiet din has erupted within the usual cacophony of her antique timepiece movements.

 

Clang-bizzzz.

 

Clack.

 

Clang-bizzzz.

 

Clack.

 

Clang-bizzzzz.

 

Tucking the clothling bunch close beneath his chin by way of quick fingers, he scuttles by the console room, floating anxious feet toward the resonate of sound.

 

He follows the clanging like a prancing cat, ducking behind shifting doors and peering in rooms as he wanders toward the origination of that singular noise, touching base with walls and tables set with the occasional black cube of a New York nightstand, or, here and there, the unmistaked curl –dressed in orange- of a Louis chair.

 

His long fingers flit over a doorknob hewn of fine dark bronze, set in an incongruous arched barn door pickled with age. The whole thing changes to a nice tidy polished brass affair, with a paw knocker and a porthole, then lets him in.

 

Rassilon changes arms, then lifts his naked foot to step inside.

 

There are creaks; he can hear them.

 

Krrriiik.

 

Krruuuuk.

 

Kriiiii…

 

In the middle of the vast circular room-shaped sea of overflowing library shelves, he sees a large chair with high clawfeet, footed by an oval pan of chipped steel.

 

“Leave it to you to perform your tricks of dubious magick in a galvanized wash tin,” he finds himself murmuring, with no consent of lip- naturally he suspects the somber, spice-burgundy walls, and the man who papered them.

 

No answer.

 

He looks inside the rounded pan, and…


	24. The Third Man and the Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All Roads Lead…to Protection Mummy.

“Here comes Goldilocks,” the Master murmurs, slapping his thigh from where he’s lying in a patch of tall red grass, musing on the dreaming practices of the Malay Senoi, “… can I spank him?”

 

To the Master, Koschei’s left, the Doctor, his face closed beneath the shade of an open newspaper, stirs, rumbling sleepy disapproval from the stone park bench upon which he is outstretched and napping.

 

“No- I’m taking a kip.”

 

The Master whinges at him, waving a hand, then poking a finger at the Doctor’s ample chin, tapping just so against the pallid skin there.

 

“Just a little? Please?”

 

The Doctor heaves a sigh, then blinks and resettles himself on the bench, turning round to the other side in a languid twist of weight and length of leg.

 

“All right, Johnny Appletweed- but don’t blame me if he steals your quadricycle.”

 

No answer, as a blonde man stumbles into the small clearing, back-ending into the furniture and tearing his clothes.

 

Shripp!

 

The Master gets to his feet, grinning broadly like a well-manicured shark at a two legged buffet, “Well, Daisy, what do you have to say for yourself? These apples are still green because of you!” he thrusts two fingers covered in rich dark chocolate toward Hainishtymion’s blonde head, then flings them at the three unripe apples sitting in the basket near the Doctor’s bench. “What are we going to do about that, eh? You’ve made us miss the bloody show! As it is, we’re going to have to TIVO it! TIVO! Moron.” He raises a fist for pumping, and screams wordlessly, “TIVO!”

 

His fingers smear their sweet brown gold along Hainishtymion’s nose, at which he scowls and adds, softening a fraction, “…stupid boy. Do you have any notion of how hard it is to unbrick a PVR for a discontinued TIVO? That’s what you left us with! And why don’t you know where he is out There? Because neither do we! The bloody bowtied troll won’t tell us.”

                                              

He turns to the Doctor, who is snoring loudly on his side, sprawled out on the bench still.

 

“Do you know,” he breathes, grabbing the blonde man by the ears and pulling him so viciously close that the air rushes out like a vacuum from between them, “...what that idiot has been through to fix your mess?”

 

Hainishtymion opens his pale lips, but crystal tears jettison in grand wells from his lavender eyes instead, growing into ice sculptures that ting from his cheeks and shatter on the cobbles of the old Roman road beneath them.

 

“Waaaah! I’m sorry I didn’t eat my tafelshrew at dinner! I’m sorry!” his handsome, windy face, suddenly boyish and so small, scrunches up like a bruised lemon, and the Master sighs down at him disapprovingly.

 

“… you are not a Fishpig- be grateful,” the Master says softly, grabbing the man’s ears and cupping his cheeks before shoving him away, forcing the boy to trace a line of sight toward the Doctor again.

 

Those young bright eyes do widen at the lines of the man sleeping fitfully on the bench, but then…

 

Hanishtymion collapses to the ground, clutching his head as he sits on his knees and hunches.

 

His blond hair begins to poke back out from his grasping hands and crawl upward, drifting as if lifted by a sudden lack of gravity. Then his ears slide round, his whole face shifting about like the masks on a Shishin Pagoda.

 

When those hands come down, the dark bronze face of a baby stares up at the Master’s stubble-tipped chin; it has the mouth of a simple wooden doll, a simple tongue in groove carving. Hainish reaches toward him, combing soft fingers across the bridge of his nose, and…

 

The Master feels his carefully manicured narrow eyebrows shoot up through his hair like two flirting birds.

 

There is a sudden redness, a poking and prodding of the veins around the Master’s eyes and then...

 

Plop! Plop!

 

Hainishtymion’s hands plunge into the Master’s sockets, making a grisly withdrawal.

 

The Master screams, his mouth cracking open abruptly; but the noise is drowned by the whir of Hainish’s head making a new revolution- probably to the mask of a pretty woman with long hair, judging by the swish of tresses and the scent of flowers.

 

Then, he can feel the wind of Hainishtymion’s hand at his vulnerable earlobe, as though deeply desirous of an earring.

 

“Oh and I know what happens next, you little snot! I don’t think so, I’m not your… wuh wait! Ow!”

 

No more ear.

 

The Master holds the draining bloody stump of his left ear, trying to guess when the other hand will come up and grab seconds.

 

Suddenly a sign of life bumble-buzzes from the bench, a quiet thumping in double time.

 

Up goes a lift in the air, a signal the hand is rising again, and…

 

Shriipp!

 

“Bring it o…”

 

 But the Master never finishes his sentence.

 

Instead, he feel-hears, through the drippy clumps of cochlea on either side of him, that lightning whir of terror that brings a new head, ambling into efficient, mechanical place like some horrid Ferris Wheel.

 

Rrrr-glomp.

 

The wrapping of tight young fingers soon follows, ensorcelling his tongue with promises of the afterlife.

 

There follows a long, wet sound of ripping.

 

Thliippppppp.

 

Then the whir again; but this time, Hainish elbows himself up, crawling on his hands and knees across the strong Roman cobbles to the bench and dragging the Master’s crumpled grey-hoodied form with him, by the hood scruff.

 

The man on the bench raises up, the newspaper with spy holes cut in crossword still hanging, obscuring his face in ode; it renders him a rather fetching chip shop bride.

 

“Come here, Hainish,” the man barks so softly, stiffly, reaching with light hands and light words for the young man, who comes to him on dusty knees.

 

Hainish watches as the man reaches down to put one of the now half red, half green apples in the Master’s mouth, shoving down so the blood slick teeth grab the fruit’s hard flesh.

 

“A little closer…” the man cajoles, patting the bench seat, then placing a hand gently on Hainish’s blond head.

 

Through the slots of words cut in the newsprint, there is a hint of brilliant peridot eye; below that oculus, a cheeky right-sided grin. He says, in a voice gravelly and sweet and sleep-ripe as a lamb’s, “Really Koschei… I have a derby you could wear. A red tie, too.”

 


	25. Don't PI for Me, Argent Tina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bridgework.

Flashback.

 

It is the Dream again.

                          

Flaminarixodaparcaftion settles further into her fluffy chair, crossways from her father… whose hands are in the dishes.

 

With a pale blue apron buckling his hips, he and his work and his bum bob in front of her; he is humming a showtune.

 

On the outside.

 

Today, they were at dinner in a garden, lit with the light of dark ivy and curtains of scrubby moss instead of drippy candles and scruffy squares of plaid.

 

As he turned round from the counter, he had two things in his hands; a plump sour apple, candy green. A luscious deep red cherry.

 

The lively cherry rested in his right hand, lolling stem and bulb like a popped jack in the box. The goodly apple sat his left however, stalwart, waiting, a soldier at attention.

 

He hadn’t the apron on, then.

 

Beneath snowy straight hair longer than she is, her eyelids flutter, remembering; little diamonds in the hand, beneath a good light. Her eyes open on her own name, written in an unfamiliar hand on a little paper card. His fingers are placed precariously on a corner and a half, holding it in her face. His other hand is holding hers, guiding her to a table beset by just the right amount of moonlight.

 

“You look pretty! Did you do your hair?” he murmurs from behind the safety of the card.

 

She tries to look around the card, peering and peeking her face towards the edge of the micro-universe of her, him, his fingers and a folded piece of thin cardboard.

 

He follows her gaze, hiding everything as he moves the card to avoid her casual glances at the Outside.

 

Long, strong, square fingers calculating, qualifying; suddenly her self, bare teenage shoulders, blind eyes, bodice of white and lavender, tight surrealist buns, white dadaist legs and all, is maneuvered into the chair in which she now sits.

 

A large and comfy chair. No particular color.

 

She looks down.

 

The table is in a Mission style, as in wood, short, simple and thick.

 

The dinner, though.

 

That is minimalist.

 

A bowl. A spoon. Both set demurely on a place setting.

 

The bowl is filled with…

 

Her lavender eyes widen.

 

There is a soaked and purple bowtie in the soup.

 

A lone white noodle, long and nudged by a shallow broth, its liquid softly lapping.

 

A smudge of flour dents the concretion of the bowl, a little to the left, up, near the ranging circular edge.

 

Narrow gold lines trumpet around the bowl’s top in little races.

 

The bowtie, however…

 

She picks up her spoon.

 

The spoon is thick in her fingers, smooth and stained… the grains of dark bubinga.

 

Abrupt, a memory squirts through her, like the piss of a tense lemon.

 

She laughs. But then she recalls it.

 

Her naked ten years, shuffling into the garden.  Ten year old bottoms of toes, touching grass and leaves and the soft meditation of moss underfoot. Ten year old eyes, glaring and staring, sharp with ribbons of red from too much looking at everything.

 

A hand comes from behind her; the long square fingers hold a little crystal bottle with a golden dropper.

                    

Her young lavender spies absorb another idea, though; she wanders toward a small pool, hovering at the median of a crumbling, grainy wall.

                                                          

A pool in midair, she thinks, and dips her ten year old head into it.

 

A little too cold, and pale and blue; but at least her eyes are round again, instead of sharp and dry and red and paper-wrinkled.

 

Her daddy laughs, the sparking letters of his wordlessness full with happy-sounds.

 

Now she is at the table again, grown. Sitting quietly. Wondering. Her hands picking carefully at the pretty pale violets daddy must have weaved to make her dress.

 

He is in the apron again, humming as he sticks his bunny paws into the bubbly grey dishwater.

 

His tail wiggles at her merrily, a puffy white spring of confused cloud.

 

There is something she wants to know, she realises.

 

“Daddy, where did you get the dish soap?”

 

Then his brown fur paws raise up from the dishpan, holding something.

 

A round stick of pearl… a handle… a silvery moon in the center.

 

A mirror.

 

His rabbit shoulders stiff like a struck tree branch. His body straightens slowly.

 

His bristling fur blows apart from itself as he clings with weak bunny elbows to the sink.

 

“Not yet,” his little pink nosed face suddenly charges; the mirror dances in his paws, this way, that way, up into the air, a little silver vulture, out for pennies.

 

His desperate, slippy paws slap together though, catching it expertly before it dare twist around and reveal him.

 

In those burly swordsman paws, the caught mirror turns as he wishes, hiding his face behind its pearl backing.

 

It is with the mirror, in that moment, that he turns, glistening like the dishes in a coating of bubbles and water and soap.

 

 A stewed rabbit.

 

“Back away from me, just a little, would you my dear?” he mumbles from behind the safety of the mirror’s pearl backing, pushing out delicately with his big warm paws, “…it’s just that I burned myself, and I don’t want you to see. Back away, yes that’s it, a little more, my girl! There you go, now…”

 

Is he warning her away?

 

Strangely, from behind the mirror, little soaps drop from his face onto the red and green grass, like an absurd rain.

 

Sighing, Flamina takes a step behind, her throat crushing on a hard lump; it could be purple silk, cotton maybe.

 

Another backward step. Her foot breaks over a little twig- the sound throws her in his suggested direction.

 

Her scrabbling fingers fit to peels of paint, old dust and leaves, scraping against sharp bits of splintered dry wood. An open window frame.

 

Ultimately, her bum trips too, and she falls in.

 

The rabbit leans in, mirror still in face, and calls down, “…you don’t have to remember me if you don’t want to! Just… try to be a good girl, be nice to the other children, don’t borrow so much you can’t pay it back, and don’t eat too many pears!”

 

The last bit wobbles, glub-glubbing as if underwater.

 

A low, interrupting screech begins.

 

Shrrr…

 

Shrrrrr…

 

Shtk!

 

The crispy cacophony of a window shoves shut, smacking the rabbit on the head.

 

It leaves a big lump, christening his temples thoroughly.

 

After his paws fumble a stopwatch from somewhere, his long ears crisp up suddenly, listening for a sound; a thud from outside. The paws start wringing each other, like a much abused dishcloth.

 

When he doesn’t hear the thud after a few moments, his little bunny nose wrinkles his mouth in a little rabbit smile.

 


	26. Apple Grass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fruit Coroner.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Apple Grass

 

His mouth claws the ground; his teeth, however, pull at a cave of endless fur.

 

A small glint of metal rushes across his lips.

 

He angles himself to grasp it, touching it with his tongue.

 

Cold.

 

Wet.

 

Square.

 

A hole? In the middle, tiny.

 

Even edges, no sharp bits.

 

Tapering.

 

He imagines the tan back of a dromedary camel, sat in a dark cherry rocker, long toes gripping a set of needles.

 

Then he imagines the reverse.

 

He caresses the edge of his tongue against the smooth metal, exploring the triangle, the square.

 

The circle in the center.

 

Things like dots stick up in a line down the center, like the track of a ski slope cart.

 

So it’s a zipper, then.

 

His lips curve across, erupting in a gleam that is wholly Cheshire.

 

He grips with his teeth and pulls with his jaw, organizing the mechanism with agile lips.

 

He tugs. He yanks.

 

How did the zipper get inside, he wonders as he begins to see progress, a bleed-through of light into his little cave.

 

Drip, drop, drip.

 

Like water in a deep cavern.

 

Trkkkkkkk goes the backward zipper, born forward by his mouth.

 

Fur agitates his ankles, burning his knees. He squirms.

 

It rubs against his bits, biting him with little fires.

 

It squirms, itching against his stomach.

 

His tightening nipples dance in the face of No More Of This Tedium.

 

 The pooling light becomes a wave of triangular rays, superimposed on rainbow rings.

 

A shove.

 

Jack spills out of Jack, and into the sun.

 

The green of grass and mud greets him.

 

Dirt stuffs his nose, earthy and charitable.

 

The Time Agent is, it appears, a smudge in someone’s back yard.

 

Swing-swoosh!

 

Clink.

 

A screen door closing.

 

Jack blinks against the day, letting the grit fall from his long eyelashes.

 

His delighted blue orbs latch blearily onto the yellow plaster trousers of a sturdy, faded lawn gnome.

 

Leading past the little gnome, there is a series of barefoot tracks leading into the house that owns that screen door.

 

“Locked, it looks like,” Jack murmurs, getting up and dusting off. A sudden glare from the sun skirts across his vision, singing something as it seems to lay a track of fire in the grass for a moment.

 

His eyes float up, following.

 

The breeze is breaking and entering through a small window…

 

The yard turns like a merry go round; the white house melts into the edges of a bowl, and the screen door becomes a silvery decorative line, just above the strange green noodles.

 

In his hand, there is a smashed fruit; red bits of peel reveal the pale cream flesh of a superbly depressed apple.

 

Hearing that whistle again, he ducks another of the falling fruit, diving backward onto one knee and a hand.

 

 The hand curves around its landing spot; fake fur… a zipper.

 

 Jack turns around…

 

“The panda!” he breathes, his chest heaving.

 

Then he relaxes.

 

The silver glint of the zipper is shining in the afternoon sun, a testament to Anahata, the green chakra.

 

“Hirsute…’ he says, grinning, appreciating the situation along with his chin. Then he stands up again, letting the furry costume slip back onto the grass.

 

He walks away from it, toward the gnome again.

 

A pile of apples shifts from the roof of the house, casting a strange shadow for a second as they fall, a triangle made of dots; one, two, three, four.

 

Jack watches the shade mutate out of sync as it grows toward the ground, then stops.

 

There is someone in the room with the open window.

 

He draws several heavy breaths, then strides over to the window and its high sill, grasping the edge for a better vantage.

 

Behind him, more apples plummet from the loud and cloudless sky and plop to the ground.

 

Soon, the gnome is up to his knee pants in the red and green fruit.

 

Jack peers into the room.

 

There is a man inside the well-shaded room; he is standing there, wrapped in a sheet. The sheet is draped like a toga around him, held by one hand clamped hard to the hip.

 

The face is hidden by a cascade of odd shadow from a part of the room Jack can’t see- probably a vase of something.

 

More apples fall outside; Jack can hear them tumbling down, hitting others already below; in fact his feet are balled on a pile of them, reaching tippy toe.

 

Jack blinks.

 

The man in the room has changed position; now all ten of those lovely square strong fingers are wrapped around an apple, part silver part gold.

 

Jack blinks again, feeling his fingers tilt in on the cold metal of the sill. His hands hurt, but… that man…

 

This time, the apple is closer to the man’s face. The light it emits will illumine his features, and then Jack can…

 

The man raises those fingers, giving up the apple in offering to his face.

 

“Just a little more,” Jack whispers, but then…

 

The window flies out of view in a rush of red, green and white and little black seeds.

 

Jack falls painfully, decisively back into the sea of apples that was once a back yard.

 

He feels something in his hand, tries to raise it to his eyes.

 

Every tiny bruise is a bastard with a hammer as he struggles to raise his arm from the weight of the terrorist fruit.

 

“This isn’t funny, Doc,” he mutters softly as his hand is finally freed, “…apple pie doesn’t even begin to enter into it.”

 

With a sigh, he gingerly bends his arm in front of his face, turning his wrist to face the object to himself.

 

Long small bit, check.

 

Smooth, slightly rough, slender, narrow with a bit of a sharp tip and a little round pushy bit, check.

 

Round, dimpled four times on bottom, but only once on top, check.

 

Roundish, dumpy, check.

 

Smelling of sweet pie, of spicy cinnamon, the juice of a lemon and warm summers, check.

 

Of course it’s an apple.

 

To be continued in: Freedom to Live


End file.
